Jeffrey Pocock

This essay is written on the following premises and argues for them. “Enlightenment” is a word or signifier, and not a single or unifiable phenomenon which it consistently signifies. There is no single or unifiable phenomenon describable as “the Enlightenment,” but it is the definite article rather than the noun which is to be avoided. In studying the intellectual history of the late seventeenth century and the eighteenth, we encounter a variety of statements made, and assumptions proposed, to which the term “Enlightenment” may usefully be applied, but the meanings of the term shift as we apply it. The things are connected, but not continuous; they cannot be reduced to a single narrative; and we find ourselves using the word “Enlightenment” in a family of ways and talking about a family of phenomena, resembling and related to one another in a variety of ways that permit of various generalizations about them. We are not, however, committed to a single root meaning of the word “Enlightenment,” and we do not need to reduce the phenomena of which we treat to a single process or entity to be termed “the” Enlightenment. It is a reification that we wish to avoid, but the structure of our language is such that this is difficult, and we will find ourselves talking of “the French” or “the Scottish,” “the Newtonian” or the “the Arminian” Enlightenments, and hoping that by employing qualifying adjectives we may constantly remind ourselves that the keyword “Enlightenment” is ours to use and should not master us.

Barbarism and Religion - Edward Gibbon's own phrase - is the title of an acclaimed sequence of works by John Pocock designed to situate Gibbon, and his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, in a series of contexts in the history of eighteenth-century Europe. This is a major intervention from one of the world's leading historians of ideas, challenging the idea of 'The Enlightenment' and positing instead a plurality of enlightenments, of which the English was one. Professor Pocock argues that the English Enlightenment of which Gibbon was part was an ecclesiastical as well as a secular phenomenon, one of several Protestant Enlightenments distinct from that of the Parisian philosophes, and part of the reconstitution of Europe after the wars against Louis XIV. The whole sequence is concerned less with the specific historiography of the Roman Empire than with the cultural history of Europe in the eighteenth century.

In this essay, the author both reviews Scott Sowerby's book Making Toleration: The Repealers and the Glorious Revolution and makes a late contribution to, or comment on, the Common Knowledge symposium “Fuzzy Studies”. Sowerby opposes the “Whig interpretation” that James II was attempting to reinstate Stuart “popery and arbitrary government” and instead presents James II's policies as aimed at liberation of the Stuart monarchy from the borough, county, and clerical elites that had brought it back to power and regarded restoration of the Church of England as their instrument and identity. The king thus had his own reasons for upholding the liberty of conscience, and so James II can be found using the language of a skeptical Enlightenment, while at the same time affirming the absoluteness of his authority and incurring the suspicion of popery. How “toleration” of Catholics and dissenters came about in Britain must be told by narrating the “hard” histories of various state structures, but there is a larger and “softer” history of Enlightenment to be extracted from that of the European ancien régime, in whose history and downfall “British history” has a part that can be narrated in both “hard” and “soft” terms. The recent revisionist accounts of James II — of which Sowerby's is said in this review to be among the best — offer the king a new role at that regime's beginnings. This review concludes by arguing that the pursuit of history as it has come to be practiced is among the “softest” modes of explanation — since it consists of the unending and unlimited pursuit of the contexts in which actions, words, and processes have been situated and need to be studied — and that the more there are of these, the more meanings the actions may bear and the fewer reasons there are for the use of Occam's razor. “The notion of ‘fuzziness’ ” does not disturb historians, as it does scholars in some other disciplines, since historians have at their disposal an established contextualist “means of navigating it.”

Before Edward Gibbon began his history of the Christian empire, he ended the first volume of the “Decline and Fall” with two chapters on the rise of Christianity before Constantine. These were believed to deny or ignore its character as revelation. It was also pointed out that this purpose was irrelevant to the history he had set out to write. The church historians he read focussed on the interactions between the Christian gospel and Hellenic philosophy. Gibbon, however, chose to emphasize the Christian rejection of cultic polytheism, and gave a Humean account of the early Christians as enthusiasts. Five years elapsed between the first and second volumes of his history. By the latter date his reputation as an unbeliever was established, and has since received more attention than the history he wrote.

As part of a programme of disintegrating and re-assembling the concept or concepts of ‘Europe’, there is offered a revision of Franco Venturi's exceptionalist account of England's place in Enlightenment, an alternative to Isaiah Berlin's account of the movement through Enlightenment to historicism. The objective is to enhance the British and English role in European intellectual history, while showing that we must rewrite the concept of ‘Europe’ in order to do so. There persists the ‘Eurosceptical enquiry’ whether ‘Europe’ is interested in history at all

This article seeks to combine two lines of thought that have been little studied: a model history of early modern historiography, and a theory of the impact of historiography on a political society. Under the former heading, it traces the growth of a narrative of European history as a series of sequels to the Roman empire, and a history of historiography as passing from classical narrative to antiquarian study and Enlightened philosophy. Under the latter, it considers the effect on political life of being narrated in a plurality of contexts, and asks whether a modern society can survive if deprived of the capacity for debating its history